Immigrant Crime in Germany

by Editor
June 19, 2018 at 9:07 am

http://www.smartertimes.com/1597/immigrant-crime-in-germany

The New York Times is under pressure from its anti-Trump paying readers to be aggressive in calling out presidential lies, or falsehoods. One problem with doing that is the risk of the Times getting it wrong. For example, an initial version of a Times article yesterday by "early morning breaking news reporter" Eileen Sullivan about immigration included the passage, "In a series of Twitter posts, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that crime in Germany is on the rise, and railed against immigration policies in Europe."

As Mickey Kaus pointed out on Twitter, the BBC reported that in Lower Saxony, "regarded as an average state - where police saw an increase of 10.4% in reported violent crimes in 2015 and 2016. Based on figures from the state's interior ministry, which keeps a separate record of alleged crimes by migrants, the report suggested that 92.1% of this increase was attributable to migrants." Reuters reported on a German government study that found, "Violent crime rose by about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, a study showed. It attributed more than 90 percent of that to young male refugees."

A later version of the Times article deleted the "falsely claimed" language, and instead wrote, "While Mr. Trump's assessment of Germany's crime problems is not accurate —crime in the country is the lowest since 1992, according to the most recent German data available — the brutal murder of a 14-year-old German girl has fueled Ms. Merkel's opponents who are against the country's migration policies that provide entry to some 10,000 asylum seekers each month." The Times didn't issue a formal correction or append one to the story, it just, "stealth edited" it, as it often does, and as the website Newsdiffs.org is useful in tracking. Maybe the key here is the difference between "violent crimes" and overall "crime," in which case, maybe Trump just forgot to include the word "violent." If that's it, it seems a bit like overkill to hammer Trump with "falsely claimed," or maybe even with "not accurate."

I'm not saying all immigrants are criminals, or even that they are more likely than non-immigrants to be criminals, or even if they were more likely that that would justify separating children and parents at the U.S. border. What I am saying is that before the Times uses the phrase "falsely claimed" as attribution in a news article, it should double check to make sure that the claim is actually false rather than merely imprecise. Otherwise people will start writing that the Times falsely claimed the president's claim was false.

Update: The Times also seems to now have broken out a separate "fact check" feature on this claim. It seems to me that the fact check totally misses the point by focusing on comparing crime in 2017 against crime in 2016. That doesn't undermine or render false the idea that violent crime increased in 2015 and 2016 after Germany let in a batch of immigrants from the war in Syria.